10/05/2008

Enemy Within, Bill Ayers' Biography

I am currently studying your biography and am astonished at your entire
history of hatred for free society. I cannot express strongly enough my disdain
of your life work. You choose to believe the worst about the best the world has
ever known. On the principals of Biblical precedence this country has fought
evil within its own ranks as well as around the world. This country has been the
greatest influence for personal freedom and the accountability of government
leaders in the history of governments. I have nothing but contempt for your
work. I believe you are the biggest reason our schools and our society is
suffering communist indoctrination. A method of governance that has proven to be
the bane of society everywhere it has ever been applied. There is simply no
capacity within the nature of man to create utopia. Stop trying, it only makes a
way for tyrants to commit the worst human rights violations imaginable. All your
heroes are these same tyrants. (Mao, Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Marx, Chavez,
etc.,)

ps. this research began on the oft repeated charge against patriots of
‘jingoist.’ Thank you for drawing my attention to your hatred of me and like
minded people. Now I know my enemy. Now I know the root of the evil influence on
our children.

William C. ("Bill") Ayers (born 1944) is a Professor of Education at
the University of Illinois at Chicago who has worked on school reform in
Chicago. He was a 1960's era radical and a founder of the Weatherman group
which later became the Weather Underground. (My addition) He is honored as
one of the most influential speakers on educational reform and therefore is
called upon to speak at educational institutions around the world.

Their founding document, signed by 11 people, including Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, John
Jacobs, Bill Ayers,
Jim Mellen, Terry
Robbins, Karen
Ashley, Jeff Jones,
Gerry Long, and Steve Tappis, called for the establishment of a "white fighting
force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other
"anti-colonial" movements,[1]
to achieve the goal of "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement
of a classless world: world Communism."[2]
The statement noted, "A revolution is a war; when the movement in this country
can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be a part of the
revolutionary war."[2]
The group's first public demonstration was the "Days of Rage," an October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago that was coordinated
with the trial of the Chicago Eight.[3]

In 1970 the group issued a
"Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, under the
name "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), and members adopted fake
identities and pursued violent covert activities. They carried
out a domestic terror campaign in the United States, consisting of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots. Their attacks were mostly
bombings of government buildings between 1969 and 1975, including the United States
Capitol (two bombs on March
1, 1970), The Pentagon (May 19, 1972), and the Harry S Truman
Building housing the United
States Department of State (on January 29, 1975), along with several banks,
police department headquarters and precincts, state and federal courthouses, and
state prison administrative offices.[4][5]
They were also notable for the Greenwich
Village townhouse explosion that claimed the lives of three of their own
members in 1970. The Weathermen largely disintegrated shortly after the U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973
and the conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North in 1975, which saw the general decline
of the New Left. Members of
the group participated in the Brinks robbery
of 1981, in which two police officers and a security guard were killed.

The origins of the Weathermen can be traced to the collapse and fragmentation
of the Students
for a Democratic Society. The split between the mainstream leadership of
SDS, or "National Office," and the Progressive Labor
Party pushed SDS as a whole further to the left. National Office leaders
such as Bernardine
Dohrn and Mike
Klonsky began announcing their emerging perspectives, and Klonksy published
a document entitled "Toward a Revolutionary
Youth Movement" (RYM). RYM promoted the philosophy that young workers
possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism, if
not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class.
Klonsky's document reflected the growing leftist philosophy of the National
Office and was eventually adopted as official SDS doctrine. During the Summer of
1969, the National Office began to split. A group led by Klonsky became known as
RYM II, and the other side, RYM I, was led by Dohrn and endorsed more aggressive
tactics.

At an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18th, 1969, the National Office
attempted to convince unaffiliated delegates not to endorse Progressive Labor
ideals. At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out
by the National Office leadership, one a revised statement of Klonksy's RYM
manifesto, the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the
Wind Blows." The latter document outlined the position of the group that would
become the Weathermen. It had been signed by 11 people, including Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, John
Jacobs, Bill Ayers,
Jim Mellen, Terry
Robbins, Karen
Ashley, Jeff Jones,
Gerry Long, and Steve Tappis.

After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of Students for a Democratic Society,
Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the real leaders of
SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet,
label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" or "SDS" was
in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, and not of SDS as a whole.
Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members,
including Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Bernadine Dohrn. For
this reason, the group, while small, was able to easily commandeer the mantle of
SDS and all of its membership lists. For a brief time, affiliations with
regional SDS cadre were
maintained from the National Office, but with Weatherman in charge the
relationships did not last long, and local chapters soon disbanded. By February
1970, the group had decided to
close the SDS National Office, concluding the major campus-based organization of
the 1960s.

The name Weatherman was derived from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean
Homesick Blues”, which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to
know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an
influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. Using this title
the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of American youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan’s
songs. It appears also that the “Weatherman” moniker used by the group may
have been meant as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor
Party, whose Worker Student
Alliance SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many former SDSers to its
ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention.

The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the analytical concepts that later
came to be known as “white privilege” and identity
politics[citation
needed]. As the unrest in poor black
neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said,
“White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of
the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”

"Days of Rage"

Haymarket Square police memorial (1889 photo)

One of the first things the Weathermen did upon splitting from SDS was to
announce that they would hold the "Days of Rage" that fall.
The event was advertised with the slogan "Bring the war home!" Hoping to
cause chaos on a level able to "wake" the American public out of what the group
saw as the public's complacency toward the "slaughter" of the Vietnamese people, the
Weathermen wanted the event to be the largest-scale protest the decade had seen.
The Weathermen believed the ‘Days of Rage’ riot was a measurement of commitment
towards the New Left. They
were with the Weathermen in the struggle or not.[7]
Although the October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago had failed to draw as
many participants as they had anticipated (originally expecting 10,000), the
estimated two to three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a riot through the Gold Coast
neighborhood, smashing windows of a bank and then those of many cars. The
Weathermen wanted to bring their fight to the 'rich enemies'.[8]
They also blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. That
night, six people were shot and seventy were arrested.[9]

On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the
Fort Dix bombing, there was an explosion in a Greenwich Villagesafe house. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the
explosion. Cathy
Wilkerson and Kathy
Boudin escaped unharmed, Wilkerson running naked from the apartment. It was
an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the former
residence of Merrill
Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill and his
son, the poet James
Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem
18 West 11th Street, the title being the address of the house. An FBI
report later stated that the group had possessed sufficient amounts of explosive
to "level ... both sides of the street".[10]

There was talk of infiltration by COINTELPRO that later turned
out to be both imagined and real. The vast majority of other Radical Left groups
that had not explicitly distanced themselves from the group at the beginning
largely did so at the point of the Village explosion accident. Despite their
marginalization, the Weather Underground pushed on, releasing a number of
manifestos and declarations while carrying on a series of bombings, which from
then on were committed free of human casualties. The bombing actions attacked
the U.S.
Capitol, The
Pentagon, police and prison buildings, and later the
rebuilt Haymarket
statue, among other targets. To avoid any loss of life as a result of these
bombings, a WU member would issue warnings to evacuate the building ahead of
time via phone.

After the Greenwich
Village incident, the Weathermen officially went underground. WUO shrank
considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. In late
April, 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what
happened in New York and the future of the organization. The group decided
against kidnapping and assassinations. They wanted to convince the American
public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in Vietnam.[11]
The group struck at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings issued in
advance. After the Greenwich Village explosion, no one was killed by WUO
bombs.[12]
On 21 May, 1970, a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising
to attack a symbol of an American institution within two weeks.[13]
The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try and find the
group, whose members were spread throughout the United States.[14]
Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see
if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any
occurrence.[15]
Then on 9 June, 1970, their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a New York City police
station.[16]
The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list
by the end of 1970.[17]
On 19 May, 1972, Ho Chi
Minh’s birthday, The Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s
bathroom in the air force wing of The Pentagon. The damage
caused flooding that devastated vital classified information on computer tapes.
Leftist groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youth
protesting American military systems in Frankfurt.[18]

The Weather Underground’s ideology changed direction in the early 1970’s.
With help from ex-Progressive Labor member, Clayton Van
Lydegraf, The Weather Underground sought a more Marxist-Leninist
approach. The leading members of the Weather Underground collaborated ideas and
published their manifesto: "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism."[19]
By the summer of 1974, five thousand copies had surfaced in coffee houses and
bookstores across America. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.[20]Abbie Hoffman publicly
praised Prairie Fire and believed every American should be given a
copy.[21]
The manifesto’s influence initiated the formation of the 'Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee' in several American cities. Hundreds of
above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather
Underground.[22]

In April 1971, The "Citizens'
Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI office in Media,
Pennsylvania.[23]
The group stole files with several hundred pages, ninety-eight percent of the
files targeted left wing individuals and groups. By the end of April, the FBI
offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.[24]
The files were a part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.[25]
However, after COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,[26]
the FBI continued their counterintelligence on groups like the Weather
Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the ‘Special
Target Information Development’ program, where agents were sent undercover
to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents
involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons and bomb
related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The Weather
Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in
with minimal charges against them.[27]

The group also took a $25,000 payment from a psychedelics distribution
organization called The
Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of
prison, transporting him to Algeria. Leary joined Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria; his initial press
release contains revolutionary rhetoric sympathetic to the Weather Underground's
cause. When Leary was eventually captured by the FBI, it
is alleged he offered to serve as an informant to capture the Weather
Underground members to reduce his prison sentence. Others, such as Robert Anton Wilson,
claim he was just feeding false information to the authorities in an attempt to
reduce his sentence. Ultimately no one was charged, and Leary served a few more
years in prison.[citation
needed]

Despite the change in their status the Weather Underground remained
underground. However, by 1976 the organization was disintegrating. The Weather
Underground held a conference in Chicago called Hard Times. The
idea was to create an umbrella organization for all radical groups. However, the
event turned sour when Hispanic and Black groups accused the Weather Underground
and the Prairie Fire Committee of limiting their roles in racial issues.[28]
The conference enhanced a division within the Weather Underground. The Weather
Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing
their original ideology.

East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged
commitments of old leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. By the
end of 1976, the Weather Underground would collapse.[29]
Within two years, many members turned themselves in after taking advantage of
President Jimmy Carter’s
amnesty for draft dodgers.[30]

Mark Rudd turned himself in to authorities on Jan. 20, 1978. Rudd was fined
$4,000 and received two years probation.[31]
Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in on Dec. 3, 1980, in New
York, with substantial media coverage. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn
received three years probation and a $15,000 fine.[32]

Certain members remained underground and joined other radical groups. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin joined the "Black Liberation
Army." On Oct. 20, 1981, in Nyack New York, the group
attempted to rob a Brinks armored truck containing more than $1 million. The
robbery turned violent, resulting in the murder of two police officers.[33]
David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms
in prison, considered the “last gasps” of the Weather Underground.[34]

After the group began dissolving in 1977, many members moved on to other
radical groups and were subsequently arrested and held for long periods. Very
few served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the
infiltration tactics used against them by COINTELPRO made much of the
evidence gathered against them deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible
in court.

The WU insisted that Emile de Antonio shoot
the documentary Underground
in 1976. However, a much more extensive, widespread, and critically-acclaimed
documentary emerged in 2002 with the Oscar-nominated The Weather
Underground by filmmakers Bill
Siegel and Sam Green. A
little seen film called Ice had several WU members in a somewhat
fictionalized revolutionary setting.

A non-violent faction of the Weather Underground continues today. The Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee is committed to the opposition of classism and
imperialism, and demands the right to liberation and justice worldwide.[36]

4 September1969 – Female members converge on
South Hills High School in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where they run through the school shouting anti-war slogans
and distributing literature promoting the “National Action.” The term
"Pittsburgh 26" refers to the 26 women arrested in connection with this
incident.

8 October-11, 1969 –
The "Days of Rage" riots occur in Chicago, damaging a large amount of property.
287 Weatherman members are arrested, and some become fugitives when they fail to
appear for trial in connection with their arrests.

November-December, 1969 – A small number of Weatherman members join the
first contingent of the Venceremos Brigade
(VB) that departs for Cuba to
harvest sugar cane.

27 December-31, 1969
– The Weathermen hold a "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, where
they finalize their plans to change into an underground organization that will
commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are
called the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO).

February, 1970 – The WUO
closes the SDS National Office in Chicago, concluding the major campus-based
organization of the 1960s. The
first contingent of the VB returns from Cuba and the second contingent departs.
By mid-February the bulk of the leading WUO members go underground.

March, 1970 – Warrants are issued for several WUO members, who become
federal fugitives when they fail to appear for trial in Chicago.

6 March1970 – 34 sticks of dynamite are discovered in the
13th Police District of Detroit, Michigan. During February and early March,
1970, members of the WUO, led by Bill Ayers, are reported to
be in Detroit, for the
purpose of bombing a police facility.[citation
needed]

30 March1970 – Chicago Police discover a
WUO "bomb factory" on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO
"weapons cache" in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO
activity in the city.

2 April1970 – A federal grand jury in Chicago returns
a number of indictments charging WUO members with violation of federal anti-riot
laws. Also, a number of additional federal warrants charging "unlawful flight to
avoid prosecution" are returned in Chicago based on the failure of WUO members
to appear for trial in local cases. (The Anti-riot Law charges were later
dropped in January, 1974.)

23 July1970 – A federal grand jury in
Detroit, Michigan, returns indictments against a number of underground WUO
members and former WUO members charging violations of various explosives and
firearms laws. (These indictments were later dropped in October, 1973.)

July, 1974 – The WUO releases the book Prairie Fire, in which
they indicate the need for a unified Communist Party. They
encourage the creation of study groups to discuss their ideology, and continue
to stress the need for violent acts. The book also admits WUO responsibility of
several actions from previous years. The Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) arises from the teachings in this book and
is organized by many former WUO members.

29 January1975 - Bombing of the State
Department; WUO states this is in response to escalation in Vietnam. (AP. "State
Department Rattled by Blast," The Daily Times-News, January 29 1975, p.1)

March, 1975 – The WUO releases its first edition of a new magazine entitled
Osawatomie.

16 June1975 - Weathermen bomb a Banco
de Ponce (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York, WUO states this is in solidarity
with striking Puerto Rican cement workers.

11 July-13, 1975 – The
PFOC holds its first national convention during which time they go through the
formality of creating a new organization.

September, 1975 – Bombing of the Kennecott
Corporation; WUO states this is in retribution for Kennecott's alleged
involvement in the Chilean coup two years prior.[37]

October 20, 1981 - Brinks robbery
in which Kathy Boudin and several members of the Weather Underground and the
Black Liberation Army stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car at the
Nanuet Mall, near Nyack, New York on October 20, 1981. The robbers were stopped
by police later that day and engaged them in a shootout, killing two police
officers and one Brinks guard as well as wounding several others.

"The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become
conscious one begins to examine the society in which he [sic, throughout] is
being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the
ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to
himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a
God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live
with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

—James Baldwin

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which,
except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be
inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children
enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor
to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something
unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a
common world.

—Hannah Arendt

The end of all education should surely be service to others. We cannot seek
achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress and prosperity of our
community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and
needs of others for their sake and for our own.

—Cesar Chavez

The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation. Act I is life
as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the settled and the status
quo. Act II is the fireworks, the moment of upheaval and dissonance, the
experience of discovery and surprise, the energy of remodeling and refashioning.
Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing
and behaving, a new way of seeing and being. Act III, of course, will
necessarily be recast in some future educational encounter as a new Act
I.This is the fundamental message of the teacher: You can change your life.
Wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, the teacher invites you to build on
all that you are, and to begin again. There is always something more to do, more
to learn and know, more to experience and accomplish. You must change your life,
and if you will, you can change your world.This sense of opportunity and
renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—is at the heart of
all teaching; it constitutes the ineffable magic drawing us back to the
classroom and into the school again and again. Education, no matter where or
when it takes place, enables people to become more powerfully and
self-consciously alive; it embraces as principle and overarching purpose the
aspiration of people to become more fully human; it impels us toward further
knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Education, at
its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full measure of
their humanity."

This is an interview of Ayers by the Voice of the Revolutionary Communist
Party,USA on October 1, 2006. It demonstrates that Ayers has not changed his
hatred for America or his associations with others who do, in the
least.http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html

Interview with Bill Ayers:

On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of
Some in Dangerous Times

The Revolution Interview is a special feature to acquaint our readers
with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music, literature,
science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of
course, their own, and they are not responsible for the views expressed
elsewhere in Revolution and on our website.

Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University
Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, returned from summer vacation
to find a letter from colleagues he’d worked with for decades. They told him
about a conference on progressive education they were planning for the spring,
and at the same time informed him that he would not be welcome to it!

Professor Ayers is the author of Teaching Toward Freedom and
many other books, anthologies, and essays on progressive education that have
appeared in many journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of
Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, Nation, and
Cambridge Journal of Education. Ayers is also the author of the book
Fugitive Days, about his experiences as one of the founders of the
‘60s-’70s group the Weather Underground.

Reggie Dylan: Tell us about how you learned that you had
been “disinvited” to a conference by your colleagues, and about your initial
response.

Bill Ayers: I returned from summer vacation and I had a
letter on my desk. The people who wrote the letter were an administrator at a
university, a dean, and then a couple of people I knew pretty well, actually. I
think I was stunned to get it because what it said in effect was we’re having an
important progressive education conference, we count you as one of the important
progressive educators in our era. Therefore we feel we owe you an explanation of
why you’re not invited. And my first read, I kind of laughed and put it aside.
But then as I thought about it I thought… There’s not a single sign of the
times, there are many, many signs of the times, and some of them are quite
hopeful, some of them are quite exciting, but here’s one of the dismal signs of
the times. These guys aren’t just progressive, they’re socialists, and they
think of themselves as activists. And yet they feel that in order to have a
meeting that will be legitimate, they have to make a decision who to exclude,
and they excluded me. And I decided it wasn’t an issue about me in particular.
It wasn’t an issue about my personal feelings. And I certainly didn’t feel hurt.
But I did feel increasingly agitated about the thinking that went into it. I
don’t have it in front of me, but here’s what I remember about being first very,
very agitated about.

They said in the body of the letter: we want to position progressive
education not as radical, but as familiar and good. Now that just steamed up my
ears because if you’re saying you’re a progressive educator… That’s one of the
things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive
educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the
concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a
contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of
progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the
relationship between school and society. But John Dewey was one of the
brilliant, brilliant writers about what democratic education would look like and
was himself an independent socialist. But he never resolved a central
contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school
and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and
politically and socially from the values you’re trying to build in a classroom.
This contradiction is something progressive educators should address, not dodge.
So this is what got me going. That’s a short version.

Reggie Dylan: In your letter you say you see great harm for
progressive education itself in what’s represented in the approach they’re
taking.

Bill Ayers: There’s two things. The first thing is they take
the teeth out of the critique. They say we’re presenting progressive education
as something nice and familiar. Then you’re not critiquing standardized testing,
you’re not critiquing sorting kids, you’re not critiquing the privatization of
the public space, you’re not critiquing the attack on teachers and the undoing
of the trade union movement. So to me, you’re just saying, I’m giving you
progressive education-lite. I don’t see the point in that. That’s one problem

The second problem is not addressing the fact that schools serve society in
subtle and overt ways. So every school in every society is a microcosm of, or
represents in some sense, that society… Here’s a great example. Sometimes its
hard for people to see this inside our own country because these things are so
familiar. But go outside our country. If you went to apartheid South Africa and
you went into the schools, you would see a white school with 15 kids per class,
high-tech, highly educated teachers, peaceful campuses. And you go to the
township and you see a classroom of 85 kids, no equipment and no rooms—and that
would speak volumes. You could see, even if you knew nothing about apartheid,
you would see apartheid represented in the school. One school is preparing kids
to run society in the future; one school is preparing kids for the mines and the
mills and the prisons.

Well, that’s true of all societies, and it’s as true of ours as any other. Go
to the schools in the inner city. Go to the schools in the privileged suburbs
and see what you see. To separate progressive education from the savage
inequalities of our schools, from the drill and kill, from the sort and punish,
it’s like a fantasy world. You’re not changing anything if you don’t address the
social inequities out there. And right now, one of the cruelest places we see
this is the question of preparing kids for prison, for unemployment, and for
war. We see this in big schools, we see this in big urban schools. Where does
the military recruit? They don’t recruit in New Trier [upper middle class school
in the Chicago suburbs]. They don’t recruit at Andover and Exeter [elite private
schools]. They’re not allowed in there. They recruit in DuSable high school and
Lawndale high school [mainly Black and poor schools in Chicago]. And that’s
unfair.

Reggie Dylan: You are on the David Horowitz list. (Horowitz
is a highly placed operative in the service of the Bush regime carrying out an
orchestrated attack on dissent and critical thinking in the universities. Bill
Ayers is one of the faculty viciously attacked in Horowitz’s book The
Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.) Maybe we can step
back a bit and talk about the bigger attack on dissent and critical thinking
that’s going on in academia in general. What you’re describing is a whole front
of this which is really important to be brought into it—what’s going on in the
elementary and secondary level. But there has been this whole attack going on in
the universities which…

Bill Ayers: I agree with you, it’s not just elementary and
high school. And I have a very strong take on it these days. I actually was
listening to Berlusconi the other day in Italy. The right-wing bastard that used
to run Italy. And Berlusconi said people criticize us because we have so much
power. But the truth is we don’t have the schools, and we don’t have the
economy. And that’s very much what’s true in America. You know, if you look at a
place like Chicago or if you look anywhere around the country, the right
wing—it’s not just conservatives, it’s probably the most reactionary cabal of
ideologues I’ve ever seen, operating with a very, very clear ideological
purpose—control all three branches of the federal government, control many state
governments, control the media—the kind of bought priesthood of the media that
does nothing but bow down to them and kowtow to them. And yet, if you hear them
talk, they’re whining about how little power they have, how marginal they are,
how under attack they are. And on the one hand, you could say, oh that’s just
demagoguery, those guys are bullshitting. But the truth is they see something
that they know that we maybe don’t know so well, and that is their power is
tenuous and short-lived. I think the reason we’re going to see the bombing of
Iran is because they know that they have a little window here to do all the bad
things that they’ve wanted to do, or in their view, to set the conditions for
all the things that they would like to struggle for over the next decade. And
they are going at their agenda with a fierce single-mindedness. And whether they
are thrown out of power, the one public space that still irritates the crap out
of them is education. And it is one of the public spaces that’s left to fight
about.

So what do we see? We see a whole frontal attack on the very idea of public
education. It’s an attack on the idea that there should be a free common public
education for all. And we see it in all kinds of subtle and in not-so-subtle
forms. Subtle forms like zero tolerance. What’s the point of the zero tolerance
in a democracy? In a democratic school system, classroom justice is flexible.
But not in an authoritarian society. In an authoritarian society classroom
justice is authoritarian. Zero tolerance, right? So there’s that kind of attack.
And the obsession with a single-minded standard of standardization. And again,
I’m a big fan of standards. But I’m against standardization which I take to be
fundamentally anti-democratic. And I’m for standards set by people working in
classrooms with one another. And then we see the metaphorical market being held
up as the ideal of what the public schools should become. So we see charters and
we see vouchers. But behind it all is the idea that it’s a market, that there
are consumers and that there are producers, etc.

As far as higher education is concerned, it’s like, anybody who works in
higher education like me—and we hear it said this is a bastion of liberal
thought and this is where the radicals hang out—we’re like completely stunned.
We have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean its true I’m here, but its
also true there’s a whole bunch of right-wing colleagues up and down the hallway
who promote the status quo and believe in it and so on. And that’s true across
the academy. So why are they on the attack? Because it is true people with a
critical view can find a place and things to do —and not only things to do, but
a public forum from which to have these debates. That’s unacceptable to these
hard right-wingers, unacceptable. And so that’s why we’re seeing, in my mind why
we’re seeing a wholesale attack on education generally.

On the level of K-12, we’re seeing the attack on the public space. And on the
level of higher education, that attack on the public space is an attack on the
idea that intellectual freedom has a place. And I think that’s huge, very, very
important.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection. Because you have
kids coming to college now who have been fed a very narrow understanding of
reality, including rooted in fundamentalist religion, rooted in the notion of
evolution being a theory and not a fact. And they come to the university and
they get challenged with ideas they’ve never heard before. They’re being
encouraged to question things in a way they never have before. And to overturn
that seems to be the goal of what Horowitz is doing. And you know we were
talking about this, Ward Churchill has become a concentration point of that.

Bill Ayers: Well, Ward Churchill is a great example because
what I think people, leftists are continually doing with the Ward Churchill case
is missing this larger context you and I are talking about and instead kind of
parsing, “Well, what did he say and do I agree with it.” What the hell do I
care? First of all, there was a thorough study done by a university committee
that never should have been set up, and they found a few, a tiny, a handful of
instances where he might have borrowed a phrase, but nothing like Doris
Kearns-Goodwin [a widely published historian who was found to have plagiarized
extensively in one of her books] did, nothing like, you know, the big academics
at Harvard have done, like Dershowitz [who has been accused of plagiarism]. And
yet somehow he’s held to the standard. And then people on the left again feel
like they have to say, well this is part of what Ward says I don’t agree with.
What has that got to do with it? He’s being pilloried for his politics, for
being a leftist, for being a critic of U.S. imperialism as it relates to Native
Americans. How can we as socialists or as communists or as leftists, how can we
leave him in the cold and say, well I’m a good leftist because I don’t talk the
way Ward talks. I find that appalling. And I would hope that when they come to
get Ward, we all link arms and don’t allow it.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection between them going
after Ward Churchill and Horowitz’ book, The Professors, which has a
hundred professors in it, and the point you make at the end of your letter of,
where does this end? You said the attempt to cleanse has no end.

Bill Ayers: It’s not only cowardly, it’s cynical. But it’s
suicidal. And by cynical what I mean is that you don’t trust people and so you
kind of try to parse out your own little place to have your career as a lefty.
And that just makes me sad when it doesn’t make me sick. You have to believe
that if you speak the truth, if you speak up and speak the truth as you
understand it, and you’re willing to listen and be in dialogue with people, that
people can get it. So the cowardliness of not speaking out—we see this in the
Democratic Party all the time. Why won’t they speak out against the war? They
know better, some of them. But they won’t. And partly because they’re bought
into the same system. But even those who know better won’t do it, and the reason
is they don’t trust people. And we as revolutionaries have to say that at the
end of the day, people will be smart enough, good enough, strong enough to stand
up. But why should they do it if we don’t have the courage to do it? And the
letter I got was a cowardly letter. Its cynical, it’s cowardly, and it’s
slippery.

Ayers is an enemy of America in the highest order, as surely as Benedict
Arnold was a traitor, Ayers is violating the will of the people and subverting
the ideals this country was built on. There is no excuse for the college that
allowed him to learn his trade and use it to work the destruction of this
country from within upon the most innocent among us. Neither is there any
excuse for the institutions of higher learning for giving him a platform from
which to operate this subversive work. All organizations involved in this man's
rise through the ranks of educators should be brought up on charges of
subversion of our school kids and traitorous activities. He may not be bombing
people anymore, but he is certainly creating an environment in which others are
encouraged to take violent action against the common good and the welfare of the
United States. How can we count the people who've acted in violence upon
American citizens in the name of anti-American sentiments this man has inflicted
on our youth and upon our future teachers and professors? God only, knows.

To quote Reverend Wormbrand when he was testifying before the American
Congress in a hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration
of the Internal Security Act and Other International Security Laws, of the
Committee on the Judiciary, Washington D.C. on Friday, May 6, 1966.

It may be right for a state to have peaceful existence with communism. I
do not know. That is a question for Johnson and Goldwater to decide. But the
church can never have peaceful coexistence with atheism. Everybody would
laugh if I would say that health can peacefully exist with the microbe of
tuberculosis, that the FBI can coexist peacefully with gangsters, that the
church can peacefully exist with drunkenness, but communism and atheism is
much worse than drug addiction and drunkenness. You drink a little wine and the
next day it passes, but communism poisons youth and our children since 50 years.
How can there be peaceful existence with this on the side of churchmen and the
church leadership I cannot understand. I must say I have been very
sad. I have read in your periodicals that, I do not know why, church bodies here
ask the admission of Red China in the organization of allied nations. It may be
right. I do not know politics. I do not know what this organization of allied
nations is, but I ask myself, "You, a church periodical, why don't you write
about the tortures inflicted to Chinese Christians by the communists? That is
your business and leave the business of politics to the Senate and like this."

Reverend Wormbrand was giving testimony on the Communists' behavior toward
Christianity in Rumania where he'd been imprisoned numerous times for preaching
against Communism. In prison he underwent torture and brainwashing and suffered
every mockery unimaginable of his faith. He witnessed the tortured deaths of
numerous believers. Communism always, always results in this kind of human
rights violations and far worse. Atheist doctors wanted to know his Savior
because according to everything they knew about healthcare, the Reverend should
have been dead. When he came out of Rumania and for the first time in 14 years
had a chance to see world events, to read anything including the Bible or a
newspaper, he found the Western politicians and church leaders meeting with his
interrogators to make or keep peace.

Bill Ayers sees only the evil of the free world and paints a picture of
glorious peaceful care for the subjects of all the tyrants of communism. He and
everybody like him need to be prevented from influencing any child and any
educator. They need to be prevented from participation in any authority of any
kind in our society.

Here in California, the opposite is happening. Laws on the books banning the
inculcation of Communism are being repealed. The story is found at this
link:

McCarthyism was a wild case of civil liberties violations used to increase
the power of a few politicians under the auspices of protecting our nation from
radical elements of Communism within our ranks. The abuses lasted for a few
years and essentially lost its teeth shortly after it began, but since 1968 the
pendulum has swung the other way and for 40 years has remained in the over
precaution against overbearing Congressional powers. Now there are no controls
on the presence and influence of these parties who have overt priorities to
destroy the purpose of freedom to every citizen and accountability of every
leader.

With California and Florida and other states tossing these protective laws
out, the radical left will have an unprecedented free reign to pervert the
purposes of state run schools to radicalize students to violent overthrow of the
U.S. government. If Ayers has managed to do this much damage since 1984 when he
graduated for his first teaching credentials, what will be possible in the next
24 years with so many teachers having bought his anti-American, anti-freedom
agenda already in place? His students have moved from classrooms to court
benches, to high political offices, to scientists, to every area of American
authority and academia. In very short order, some of his students will be
qualifying to run for the highest office. Barack is only the first taste of
what is possible. Without action, this radical element will begin ruling this
nation.

The court that had this man and released him because of a technicality should
be held accountable. The government that has allowed this overt destructive
process to go on for 24 years has to be held accountable. The colleges that
have taken this criminal terrorist in and given him
honored access to our kids have to be held
accountable. The platform this man has built from the ground up has to be
dismantled, burned, and buried forever. To quote Ronald Reagan; "Freedom is never more
than one generation away from extinction."

Comments

I am currently studying your biography and am astonished at your entire
history of hatred for free society. I cannot express strongly enough my disdain
of your life work. You choose to believe the worst about the best the world has
ever known. On the principals of Biblical precedence this country has fought
evil within its own ranks as well as around the world. This country has been the
greatest influence for personal freedom and the accountability of government
leaders in the history of governments. I have nothing but contempt for your
work. I believe you are the biggest reason our schools and our society is
suffering communist indoctrination. A method of governance that has proven to be
the bane of society everywhere it has ever been applied. There is simply no
capacity within the nature of man to create utopia. Stop trying, it only makes a
way for tyrants to commit the worst human rights violations imaginable. All your
heroes are these same tyrants. (Mao, Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Marx, Chavez,
etc.,)

ps. this research began on the oft repeated charge against patriots of
‘jingoist.’ Thank you for drawing my attention to your hatred of me and like
minded people. Now I know my enemy. Now I know the root of the evil influence on
our children.

William C. ("Bill") Ayers (born 1944) is a Professor of Education at
the University of Illinois at Chicago who has worked on school reform in
Chicago. He was a 1960's era radical and a founder of the Weatherman group
which later became the Weather Underground. (My addition) He is honored as
one of the most influential speakers on educational reform and therefore is
called upon to speak at educational institutions around the world.

Their founding document, signed by 11 people, including Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, John
Jacobs, Bill Ayers,
Jim Mellen, Terry
Robbins, Karen
Ashley, Jeff Jones,
Gerry Long, and Steve Tappis, called for the establishment of a "white fighting
force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other
"anti-colonial" movements,[1]
to achieve the goal of "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement
of a classless world: world Communism."[2]
The statement noted, "A revolution is a war; when the movement in this country
can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be a part of the
revolutionary war."[2]
The group's first public demonstration was the "Days of Rage," an October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago that was coordinated
with the trial of the Chicago Eight.[3]

In 1970 the group issued a
"Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, under the
name "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), and members adopted fake
identities and pursued violent covert activities. They carried
out a domestic terror campaign in the United States, consisting of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots. Their attacks were mostly
bombings of government buildings between 1969 and 1975, including the United States
Capitol (two bombs on March
1, 1970), The Pentagon (May 19, 1972), and the Harry S Truman
Building housing the United
States Department of State (on January 29, 1975), along with several banks,
police department headquarters and precincts, state and federal courthouses, and
state prison administrative offices.[4][5]
They were also notable for the Greenwich
Village townhouse explosion that claimed the lives of three of their own
members in 1970. The Weathermen largely disintegrated shortly after the U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973
and the conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North in 1975, which saw the general decline
of the New Left. Members of
the group participated in the Brinks robbery
of 1981, in which two police officers and a security guard were killed.

The origins of the Weathermen can be traced to the collapse and fragmentation
of the Students
for a Democratic Society. The split between the mainstream leadership of
SDS, or "National Office," and the Progressive Labor
Party pushed SDS as a whole further to the left. National Office leaders
such as Bernardine
Dohrn and Mike
Klonsky began announcing their emerging perspectives, and Klonksy published
a document entitled "Toward a Revolutionary
Youth Movement" (RYM). RYM promoted the philosophy that young workers
possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism, if
not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class.
Klonsky's document reflected the growing leftist philosophy of the National
Office and was eventually adopted as official SDS doctrine. During the Summer of
1969, the National Office began to split. A group led by Klonsky became known as
RYM II, and the other side, RYM I, was led by Dohrn and endorsed more aggressive
tactics.

At an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18th, 1969, the National Office
attempted to convince unaffiliated delegates not to endorse Progressive Labor
ideals. At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out
by the National Office leadership, one a revised statement of Klonksy's RYM
manifesto, the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the
Wind Blows." The latter document outlined the position of the group that would
become the Weathermen. It had been signed by 11 people, including Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, John
Jacobs, Bill Ayers,
Jim Mellen, Terry
Robbins, Karen
Ashley, Jeff Jones,
Gerry Long, and Steve Tappis.

After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of Students for a Democratic Society,
Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the real leaders of
SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet,
label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" or "SDS" was
in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, and not of SDS as a whole.
Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members,
including Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Bernadine Dohrn. For
this reason, the group, while small, was able to easily commandeer the mantle of
SDS and all of its membership lists. For a brief time, affiliations with
regional SDS cadre were
maintained from the National Office, but with Weatherman in charge the
relationships did not last long, and local chapters soon disbanded. By February
1970, the group had decided to
close the SDS National Office, concluding the major campus-based organization of
the 1960s.

The name Weatherman was derived from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean
Homesick Blues”, which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to
know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an
influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. Using this title
the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of American youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan’s
songs. It appears also that the “Weatherman” moniker used by the group may
have been meant as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor
Party, whose Worker Student
Alliance SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many former SDSers to its
ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention.

The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the analytical concepts that later
came to be known as “white privilege” and identity
politics[citation
needed]. As the unrest in poor black
neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said,
“White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of
the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”

"Days of Rage"

Haymarket Square police memorial (1889 photo)

One of the first things the Weathermen did upon splitting from SDS was to
announce that they would hold the "Days of Rage" that fall.
The event was advertised with the slogan "Bring the war home!" Hoping to
cause chaos on a level able to "wake" the American public out of what the group
saw as the public's complacency toward the "slaughter" of the Vietnamese people, the
Weathermen wanted the event to be the largest-scale protest the decade had seen.
The Weathermen believed the ‘Days of Rage’ riot was a measurement of commitment
towards the New Left. They
were with the Weathermen in the struggle or not.[7]
Although the October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago had failed to draw as
many participants as they had anticipated (originally expecting 10,000), the
estimated two to three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a riot through the Gold Coast
neighborhood, smashing windows of a bank and then those of many cars. The
Weathermen wanted to bring their fight to the 'rich enemies'.[8]
They also blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. That
night, six people were shot and seventy were arrested.[9]

On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the
Fort Dix bombing, there was an explosion in a Greenwich Villagesafe house. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the
explosion. Cathy
Wilkerson and Kathy
Boudin escaped unharmed, Wilkerson running naked from the apartment. It was
an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the former
residence of Merrill
Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill and his
son, the poet James
Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem
18 West 11th Street, the title being the address of the house. An FBI
report later stated that the group had possessed sufficient amounts of explosive
to "level ... both sides of the street".[10]

There was talk of infiltration by COINTELPRO that later turned
out to be both imagined and real. The vast majority of other Radical Left groups
that had not explicitly distanced themselves from the group at the beginning
largely did so at the point of the Village explosion accident. Despite their
marginalization, the Weather Underground pushed on, releasing a number of
manifestos and declarations while carrying on a series of bombings, which from
then on were committed free of human casualties. The bombing actions attacked
the U.S.
Capitol, The
Pentagon, police and prison buildings, and later the
rebuilt Haymarket
statue, among other targets. To avoid any loss of life as a result of these
bombings, a WU member would issue warnings to evacuate the building ahead of
time via phone.

After the Greenwich
Village incident, the Weathermen officially went underground. WUO shrank
considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. In late
April, 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what
happened in New York and the future of the organization. The group decided
against kidnapping and assassinations. They wanted to convince the American
public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in Vietnam.[11]
The group struck at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings issued in
advance. After the Greenwich Village explosion, no one was killed by WUO
bombs.[12]
On 21 May, 1970, a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising
to attack a symbol of an American institution within two weeks.[13]
The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try and find the
group, whose members were spread throughout the United States.[14]
Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see
if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any
occurrence.[15]
Then on 9 June, 1970, their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a New York City police
station.[16]
The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list
by the end of 1970.[17]
On 19 May, 1972, Ho Chi
Minh’s birthday, The Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s
bathroom in the air force wing of The Pentagon. The damage
caused flooding that devastated vital classified information on computer tapes.
Leftist groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youth
protesting American military systems in Frankfurt.[18]

The Weather Underground’s ideology changed direction in the early 1970’s.
With help from ex-Progressive Labor member, Clayton Van
Lydegraf, The Weather Underground sought a more Marxist-Leninist
approach. The leading members of the Weather Underground collaborated ideas and
published their manifesto: "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism."[19]
By the summer of 1974, five thousand copies had surfaced in coffee houses and
bookstores across America. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.[20]Abbie Hoffman publicly
praised Prairie Fire and believed every American should be given a
copy.[21]
The manifesto’s influence initiated the formation of the 'Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee' in several American cities. Hundreds of
above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather
Underground.[22]

In April 1971, The "Citizens'
Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI office in Media,
Pennsylvania.[23]
The group stole files with several hundred pages, ninety-eight percent of the
files targeted left wing individuals and groups. By the end of April, the FBI
offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.[24]
The files were a part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.[25]
However, after COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,[26]
the FBI continued their counterintelligence on groups like the Weather
Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the ‘Special
Target Information Development’ program, where agents were sent undercover
to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents
involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons and bomb
related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The Weather
Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in
with minimal charges against them.[27]

The group also took a $25,000 payment from a psychedelics distribution
organization called The
Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of
prison, transporting him to Algeria. Leary joined Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria; his initial press
release contains revolutionary rhetoric sympathetic to the Weather Underground's
cause. When Leary was eventually captured by the FBI, it
is alleged he offered to serve as an informant to capture the Weather
Underground members to reduce his prison sentence. Others, such as Robert Anton Wilson,
claim he was just feeding false information to the authorities in an attempt to
reduce his sentence. Ultimately no one was charged, and Leary served a few more
years in prison.[citation
needed]

Despite the change in their status the Weather Underground remained
underground. However, by 1976 the organization was disintegrating. The Weather
Underground held a conference in Chicago called Hard Times. The
idea was to create an umbrella organization for all radical groups. However, the
event turned sour when Hispanic and Black groups accused the Weather Underground
and the Prairie Fire Committee of limiting their roles in racial issues.[28]
The conference enhanced a division within the Weather Underground. The Weather
Underground faced accusations of abandonment of the revolution by reversing
their original ideology.

East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged
commitments of old leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. By the
end of 1976, the Weather Underground would collapse.[29]
Within two years, many members turned themselves in after taking advantage of
President Jimmy Carter’s
amnesty for draft dodgers.[30]

Mark Rudd turned himself in to authorities on Jan. 20, 1978. Rudd was fined
$4,000 and received two years probation.[31]
Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in on Dec. 3, 1980, in New
York, with substantial media coverage. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn
received three years probation and a $15,000 fine.[32]

Certain members remained underground and joined other radical groups. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin joined the "Black Liberation
Army." On Oct. 20, 1981, in Nyack New York, the group
attempted to rob a Brinks armored truck containing more than $1 million. The
robbery turned violent, resulting in the murder of two police officers.[33]
David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms
in prison, considered the “last gasps” of the Weather Underground.[34]

After the group began dissolving in 1977, many members moved on to other
radical groups and were subsequently arrested and held for long periods. Very
few served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the
infiltration tactics used against them by COINTELPRO made much of the
evidence gathered against them deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible
in court.

The WU insisted that Emile de Antonio shoot
the documentary Underground
in 1976. However, a much more extensive, widespread, and critically-acclaimed
documentary emerged in 2002 with the Oscar-nominated The Weather
Underground by filmmakers Bill
Siegel and Sam Green. A
little seen film called Ice had several WU members in a somewhat
fictionalized revolutionary setting.

A non-violent faction of the Weather Underground continues today. The Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee is committed to the opposition of classism and
imperialism, and demands the right to liberation and justice worldwide.[36]

4 September1969 – Female members converge on
South Hills High School in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where they run through the school shouting anti-war slogans
and distributing literature promoting the “National Action.” The term
"Pittsburgh 26" refers to the 26 women arrested in connection with this
incident.

8 October-11, 1969 –
The "Days of Rage" riots occur in Chicago, damaging a large amount of property.
287 Weatherman members are arrested, and some become fugitives when they fail to
appear for trial in connection with their arrests.

November-December, 1969 – A small number of Weatherman members join the
first contingent of the Venceremos Brigade
(VB) that departs for Cuba to
harvest sugar cane.

27 December-31, 1969
– The Weathermen hold a "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, where
they finalize their plans to change into an underground organization that will
commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are
called the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO).

February, 1970 – The WUO
closes the SDS National Office in Chicago, concluding the major campus-based
organization of the 1960s. The
first contingent of the VB returns from Cuba and the second contingent departs.
By mid-February the bulk of the leading WUO members go underground.

March, 1970 – Warrants are issued for several WUO members, who become
federal fugitives when they fail to appear for trial in Chicago.

6 March1970 – 34 sticks of dynamite are discovered in the
13th Police District of Detroit, Michigan. During February and early March,
1970, members of the WUO, led by Bill Ayers, are reported to
be in Detroit, for the
purpose of bombing a police facility.[citation
needed]

30 March1970 – Chicago Police discover a
WUO "bomb factory" on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO
"weapons cache" in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO
activity in the city.

2 April1970 – A federal grand jury in Chicago returns
a number of indictments charging WUO members with violation of federal anti-riot
laws. Also, a number of additional federal warrants charging "unlawful flight to
avoid prosecution" are returned in Chicago based on the failure of WUO members
to appear for trial in local cases. (The Anti-riot Law charges were later
dropped in January, 1974.)

23 July1970 – A federal grand jury in
Detroit, Michigan, returns indictments against a number of underground WUO
members and former WUO members charging violations of various explosives and
firearms laws. (These indictments were later dropped in October, 1973.)

July, 1974 – The WUO releases the book Prairie Fire, in which
they indicate the need for a unified Communist Party. They
encourage the creation of study groups to discuss their ideology, and continue
to stress the need for violent acts. The book also admits WUO responsibility of
several actions from previous years. The Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) arises from the teachings in this book and
is organized by many former WUO members.

29 January1975 - Bombing of the State
Department; WUO states this is in response to escalation in Vietnam. (AP. "State
Department Rattled by Blast," The Daily Times-News, January 29 1975, p.1)

March, 1975 – The WUO releases its first edition of a new magazine entitled
Osawatomie.

16 June1975 - Weathermen bomb a Banco
de Ponce (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York, WUO states this is in solidarity
with striking Puerto Rican cement workers.

11 July-13, 1975 – The
PFOC holds its first national convention during which time they go through the
formality of creating a new organization.

September, 1975 – Bombing of the Kennecott
Corporation; WUO states this is in retribution for Kennecott's alleged
involvement in the Chilean coup two years prior.[37]

October 20, 1981 - Brinks robbery
in which Kathy Boudin and several members of the Weather Underground and the
Black Liberation Army stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car at the
Nanuet Mall, near Nyack, New York on October 20, 1981. The robbers were stopped
by police later that day and engaged them in a shootout, killing two police
officers and one Brinks guard as well as wounding several others.

"The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become
conscious one begins to examine the society in which he [sic, throughout] is
being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the
ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to
himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a
God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live
with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

—James Baldwin

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which,
except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be
inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children
enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor
to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something
unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a
common world.

—Hannah Arendt

The end of all education should surely be service to others. We cannot seek
achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress and prosperity of our
community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and
needs of others for their sake and for our own.

—Cesar Chavez

The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation. Act I is life
as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the settled and the status
quo. Act II is the fireworks, the moment of upheaval and dissonance, the
experience of discovery and surprise, the energy of remodeling and refashioning.
Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing
and behaving, a new way of seeing and being. Act III, of course, will
necessarily be recast in some future educational encounter as a new Act
I.This is the fundamental message of the teacher: You can change your life.
Wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, the teacher invites you to build on
all that you are, and to begin again. There is always something more to do, more
to learn and know, more to experience and accomplish. You must change your life,
and if you will, you can change your world.This sense of opportunity and
renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—is at the heart of
all teaching; it constitutes the ineffable magic drawing us back to the
classroom and into the school again and again. Education, no matter where or
when it takes place, enables people to become more powerfully and
self-consciously alive; it embraces as principle and overarching purpose the
aspiration of people to become more fully human; it impels us toward further
knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Education, at
its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full measure of
their humanity."

This is an interview of Ayers by the Voice of the Revolutionary Communist
Party,USA on October 1, 2006. It demonstrates that Ayers has not changed his
hatred for America or his associations with others who do, in the
least.http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html

Interview with Bill Ayers:

On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of
Some in Dangerous Times

The Revolution Interview is a special feature to acquaint our readers
with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music, literature,
science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of
course, their own, and they are not responsible for the views expressed
elsewhere in Revolution and on our website.

Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University
Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, returned from summer vacation
to find a letter from colleagues he’d worked with for decades. They told him
about a conference on progressive education they were planning for the spring,
and at the same time informed him that he would not be welcome to it!

Professor Ayers is the author of Teaching Toward Freedom and
many other books, anthologies, and essays on progressive education that have
appeared in many journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of
Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, Nation, and
Cambridge Journal of Education. Ayers is also the author of the book
Fugitive Days, about his experiences as one of the founders of the
‘60s-’70s group the Weather Underground.

Reggie Dylan: Tell us about how you learned that you had
been “disinvited” to a conference by your colleagues, and about your initial
response.

Bill Ayers: I returned from summer vacation and I had a
letter on my desk. The people who wrote the letter were an administrator at a
university, a dean, and then a couple of people I knew pretty well, actually. I
think I was stunned to get it because what it said in effect was we’re having an
important progressive education conference, we count you as one of the important
progressive educators in our era. Therefore we feel we owe you an explanation of
why you’re not invited. And my first read, I kind of laughed and put it aside.
But then as I thought about it I thought… There’s not a single sign of the
times, there are many, many signs of the times, and some of them are quite
hopeful, some of them are quite exciting, but here’s one of the dismal signs of
the times. These guys aren’t just progressive, they’re socialists, and they
think of themselves as activists. And yet they feel that in order to have a
meeting that will be legitimate, they have to make a decision who to exclude,
and they excluded me. And I decided it wasn’t an issue about me in particular.
It wasn’t an issue about my personal feelings. And I certainly didn’t feel hurt.
But I did feel increasingly agitated about the thinking that went into it. I
don’t have it in front of me, but here’s what I remember about being first very,
very agitated about.

They said in the body of the letter: we want to position progressive
education not as radical, but as familiar and good. Now that just steamed up my
ears because if you’re saying you’re a progressive educator… That’s one of the
things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive
educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the
concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a
contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of
progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the
relationship between school and society. But John Dewey was one of the
brilliant, brilliant writers about what democratic education would look like and
was himself an independent socialist. But he never resolved a central
contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school
and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and
politically and socially from the values you’re trying to build in a classroom.
This contradiction is something progressive educators should address, not dodge.
So this is what got me going. That’s a short version.

Reggie Dylan: In your letter you say you see great harm for
progressive education itself in what’s represented in the approach they’re
taking.

Bill Ayers: There’s two things. The first thing is they take
the teeth out of the critique. They say we’re presenting progressive education
as something nice and familiar. Then you’re not critiquing standardized testing,
you’re not critiquing sorting kids, you’re not critiquing the privatization of
the public space, you’re not critiquing the attack on teachers and the undoing
of the trade union movement. So to me, you’re just saying, I’m giving you
progressive education-lite. I don’t see the point in that. That’s one problem

The second problem is not addressing the fact that schools serve society in
subtle and overt ways. So every school in every society is a microcosm of, or
represents in some sense, that society… Here’s a great example. Sometimes its
hard for people to see this inside our own country because these things are so
familiar. But go outside our country. If you went to apartheid South Africa and
you went into the schools, you would see a white school with 15 kids per class,
high-tech, highly educated teachers, peaceful campuses. And you go to the
township and you see a classroom of 85 kids, no equipment and no rooms—and that
would speak volumes. You could see, even if you knew nothing about apartheid,
you would see apartheid represented in the school. One school is preparing kids
to run society in the future; one school is preparing kids for the mines and the
mills and the prisons.

Well, that’s true of all societies, and it’s as true of ours as any other. Go
to the schools in the inner city. Go to the schools in the privileged suburbs
and see what you see. To separate progressive education from the savage
inequalities of our schools, from the drill and kill, from the sort and punish,
it’s like a fantasy world. You’re not changing anything if you don’t address the
social inequities out there. And right now, one of the cruelest places we see
this is the question of preparing kids for prison, for unemployment, and for
war. We see this in big schools, we see this in big urban schools. Where does
the military recruit? They don’t recruit in New Trier [upper middle class school
in the Chicago suburbs]. They don’t recruit at Andover and Exeter [elite private
schools]. They’re not allowed in there. They recruit in DuSable high school and
Lawndale high school [mainly Black and poor schools in Chicago]. And that’s
unfair.

Reggie Dylan: You are on the David Horowitz list. (Horowitz
is a highly placed operative in the service of the Bush regime carrying out an
orchestrated attack on dissent and critical thinking in the universities. Bill
Ayers is one of the faculty viciously attacked in Horowitz’s book The
Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.) Maybe we can step
back a bit and talk about the bigger attack on dissent and critical thinking
that’s going on in academia in general. What you’re describing is a whole front
of this which is really important to be brought into it—what’s going on in the
elementary and secondary level. But there has been this whole attack going on in
the universities which…

Bill Ayers: I agree with you, it’s not just elementary and
high school. And I have a very strong take on it these days. I actually was
listening to Berlusconi the other day in Italy. The right-wing bastard that used
to run Italy. And Berlusconi said people criticize us because we have so much
power. But the truth is we don’t have the schools, and we don’t have the
economy. And that’s very much what’s true in America. You know, if you look at a
place like Chicago or if you look anywhere around the country, the right
wing—it’s not just conservatives, it’s probably the most reactionary cabal of
ideologues I’ve ever seen, operating with a very, very clear ideological
purpose—control all three branches of the federal government, control many state
governments, control the media—the kind of bought priesthood of the media that
does nothing but bow down to them and kowtow to them. And yet, if you hear them
talk, they’re whining about how little power they have, how marginal they are,
how under attack they are. And on the one hand, you could say, oh that’s just
demagoguery, those guys are bullshitting. But the truth is they see something
that they know that we maybe don’t know so well, and that is their power is
tenuous and short-lived. I think the reason we’re going to see the bombing of
Iran is because they know that they have a little window here to do all the bad
things that they’ve wanted to do, or in their view, to set the conditions for
all the things that they would like to struggle for over the next decade. And
they are going at their agenda with a fierce single-mindedness. And whether they
are thrown out of power, the one public space that still irritates the crap out
of them is education. And it is one of the public spaces that’s left to fight
about.

So what do we see? We see a whole frontal attack on the very idea of public
education. It’s an attack on the idea that there should be a free common public
education for all. And we see it in all kinds of subtle and in not-so-subtle
forms. Subtle forms like zero tolerance. What’s the point of the zero tolerance
in a democracy? In a democratic school system, classroom justice is flexible.
But not in an authoritarian society. In an authoritarian society classroom
justice is authoritarian. Zero tolerance, right? So there’s that kind of attack.
And the obsession with a single-minded standard of standardization. And again,
I’m a big fan of standards. But I’m against standardization which I take to be
fundamentally anti-democratic. And I’m for standards set by people working in
classrooms with one another. And then we see the metaphorical market being held
up as the ideal of what the public schools should become. So we see charters and
we see vouchers. But behind it all is the idea that it’s a market, that there
are consumers and that there are producers, etc.

As far as higher education is concerned, it’s like, anybody who works in
higher education like me—and we hear it said this is a bastion of liberal
thought and this is where the radicals hang out—we’re like completely stunned.
We have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean its true I’m here, but its
also true there’s a whole bunch of right-wing colleagues up and down the hallway
who promote the status quo and believe in it and so on. And that’s true across
the academy. So why are they on the attack? Because it is true people with a
critical view can find a place and things to do —and not only things to do, but
a public forum from which to have these debates. That’s unacceptable to these
hard right-wingers, unacceptable. And so that’s why we’re seeing, in my mind why
we’re seeing a wholesale attack on education generally.

On the level of K-12, we’re seeing the attack on the public space. And on the
level of higher education, that attack on the public space is an attack on the
idea that intellectual freedom has a place. And I think that’s huge, very, very
important.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection. Because you have
kids coming to college now who have been fed a very narrow understanding of
reality, including rooted in fundamentalist religion, rooted in the notion of
evolution being a theory and not a fact. And they come to the university and
they get challenged with ideas they’ve never heard before. They’re being
encouraged to question things in a way they never have before. And to overturn
that seems to be the goal of what Horowitz is doing. And you know we were
talking about this, Ward Churchill has become a concentration point of that.

Bill Ayers: Well, Ward Churchill is a great example because
what I think people, leftists are continually doing with the Ward Churchill case
is missing this larger context you and I are talking about and instead kind of
parsing, “Well, what did he say and do I agree with it.” What the hell do I
care? First of all, there was a thorough study done by a university committee
that never should have been set up, and they found a few, a tiny, a handful of
instances where he might have borrowed a phrase, but nothing like Doris
Kearns-Goodwin [a widely published historian who was found to have plagiarized
extensively in one of her books] did, nothing like, you know, the big academics
at Harvard have done, like Dershowitz [who has been accused of plagiarism]. And
yet somehow he’s held to the standard. And then people on the left again feel
like they have to say, well this is part of what Ward says I don’t agree with.
What has that got to do with it? He’s being pilloried for his politics, for
being a leftist, for being a critic of U.S. imperialism as it relates to Native
Americans. How can we as socialists or as communists or as leftists, how can we
leave him in the cold and say, well I’m a good leftist because I don’t talk the
way Ward talks. I find that appalling. And I would hope that when they come to
get Ward, we all link arms and don’t allow it.

Reggie Dylan: And there’s a connection between them going
after Ward Churchill and Horowitz’ book, The Professors, which has a
hundred professors in it, and the point you make at the end of your letter of,
where does this end? You said the attempt to cleanse has no end.

Bill Ayers: It’s not only cowardly, it’s cynical. But it’s
suicidal. And by cynical what I mean is that you don’t trust people and so you
kind of try to parse out your own little place to have your career as a lefty.
And that just makes me sad when it doesn’t make me sick. You have to believe
that if you speak the truth, if you speak up and speak the truth as you
understand it, and you’re willing to listen and be in dialogue with people, that
people can get it. So the cowardliness of not speaking out—we see this in the
Democratic Party all the time. Why won’t they speak out against the war? They
know better, some of them. But they won’t. And partly because they’re bought
into the same system. But even those who know better won’t do it, and the reason
is they don’t trust people. And we as revolutionaries have to say that at the
end of the day, people will be smart enough, good enough, strong enough to stand
up. But why should they do it if we don’t have the courage to do it? And the
letter I got was a cowardly letter. Its cynical, it’s cowardly, and it’s
slippery.

Ayers is an enemy of America in the highest order, as surely as Benedict
Arnold was a traitor, Ayers is violating the will of the people and subverting
the ideals this country was built on. There is no excuse for the college that
allowed him to learn his trade and use it to work the destruction of this
country from within upon the most innocent among us. Neither is there any
excuse for the institutions of higher learning for giving him a platform from
which to operate this subversive work. All organizations involved in this man's
rise through the ranks of educators should be brought up on charges of
subversion of our school kids and traitorous activities. He may not be bombing
people anymore, but he is certainly creating an environment in which others are
encouraged to take violent action against the common good and the welfare of the
United States. How can we count the people who've acted in violence upon
American citizens in the name of anti-American sentiments this man has inflicted
on our youth and upon our future teachers and professors? God only, knows.

To quote Reverend Wormbrand when he was testifying before the American
Congress in a hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration
of the Internal Security Act and Other International Security Laws, of the
Committee on the Judiciary, Washington D.C. on Friday, May 6, 1966.

It may be right for a state to have peaceful existence with communism. I
do not know. That is a question for Johnson and Goldwater to decide. But the
church can never have peaceful coexistence with atheism. Everybody would
laugh if I would say that health can peacefully exist with the microbe of
tuberculosis, that the FBI can coexist peacefully with gangsters, that the
church can peacefully exist with drunkenness, but communism and atheism is
much worse than drug addiction and drunkenness. You drink a little wine and the
next day it passes, but communism poisons youth and our children since 50 years.
How can there be peaceful existence with this on the side of churchmen and the
church leadership I cannot understand. I must say I have been very
sad. I have read in your periodicals that, I do not know why, church bodies here
ask the admission of Red China in the organization of allied nations. It may be
right. I do not know politics. I do not know what this organization of allied
nations is, but I ask myself, "You, a church periodical, why don't you write
about the tortures inflicted to Chinese Christians by the communists? That is
your business and leave the business of politics to the Senate and like this."

Reverend Wormbrand was giving testimony on the Communists' behavior toward
Christianity in Rumania where he'd been imprisoned numerous times for preaching
against Communism. In prison he underwent torture and brainwashing and suffered
every mockery unimaginable of his faith. He witnessed the tortured deaths of
numerous believers. Communism always, always results in this kind of human
rights violations and far worse. Atheist doctors wanted to know his Savior
because according to everything they knew about healthcare, the Reverend should
have been dead. When he came out of Rumania and for the first time in 14 years
had a chance to see world events, to read anything including the Bible or a
newspaper, he found the Western politicians and church leaders meeting with his
interrogators to make or keep peace.

Bill Ayers sees only the evil of the free world and paints a picture of
glorious peaceful care for the subjects of all the tyrants of communism. He and
everybody like him need to be prevented from influencing any child and any
educator. They need to be prevented from participation in any authority of any
kind in our society.

Here in California, the opposite is happening. Laws on the books banning the
inculcation of Communism are being repealed. The story is found at this
link:

McCarthyism was a wild case of civil liberties violations used to increase
the power of a few politicians under the auspices of protecting our nation from
radical elements of Communism within our ranks. The abuses lasted for a few
years and essentially lost its teeth shortly after it began, but since 1968 the
pendulum has swung the other way and for 40 years has remained in the over
precaution against overbearing Congressional powers. Now there are no controls
on the presence and influence of these parties who have overt priorities to
destroy the purpose of freedom to every citizen and accountability of every
leader.

With California and Florida and other states tossing these protective laws
out, the radical left will have an unprecedented free reign to pervert the
purposes of state run schools to radicalize students to violent overthrow of the
U.S. government. If Ayers has managed to do this much damage since 1984 when he
graduated for his first teaching credentials, what will be possible in the next
24 years with so many teachers having bought his anti-American, anti-freedom
agenda already in place? His students have moved from classrooms to court
benches, to high political offices, to scientists, to every area of American
authority and academia. In very short order, some of his students will be
qualifying to run for the highest office. Barack is only the first taste of
what is possible. Without action, this radical element will begin ruling this
nation.

The court that had this man and released him because of a technicality should
be held accountable. The government that has allowed this overt destructive
process to go on for 24 years has to be held accountable. The colleges that
have taken this criminal terrorist in and given him
honored access to our kids have to be held
accountable. The platform this man has built from the ground up has to be
dismantled, burned, and buried forever. To quote Ronald Reagan; "Freedom is never more
than one generation away from extinction."